Here is my favorite guy nurse, Phil, who enjoys feeding me almost as much as I enjoy drinking my mommy's milk.
See how my cheeks have grown with all this yummy milk? I don't look anything like I did in those week one photos do I?
This week I had a special visitor, Sonya, a very good friend that my mommy and daddy have known for over fifteen years. Turns out they met here in the city of Berkeley when they all went to college together. Sonya came to see me for the first time since I weighed only a pound and a half. She was so surprised to see that I had quintupled my birth weight!
This week was the beginning of yet another travel experience for me. Let's see, so far I have had five ambulance rides to different Bay Area hospitals. I was now ready to try mommy's favorite mode of transportation--an airplane.
The doctors here in California decided that I needed to take a trip to Michigan because my eyes are still not growing like they are supposed to. I needed to get to where some expert eye surgeons know more about how to fix my little eyes. But being a special baby still breathing supplemental oxygen, I couldn't just get on a United Airlines flight full of people with germs. So, I requested my own special plane, through my mommy of course.
After coordinating with mommy's insurance company, I had my own air ambulance plane to ride in and we set off in an ambulance together (mommy and I) to the Oakland International airport. Daddy followed in our blue Landcruiser with our luggage.
Look at all these nice people helping me out. I'm so lucky to have so much help when I need it!
The nice nurses loaded me from the ambulance to my special Learjet 35. Here I am with my flight nurse named Lori.
I was all strapped in my warm and toasty incubator and sound asleep.
Daddy and Mommy sat in the back of the jet, with Mommy's breast pump nearby so she could make more milk for me in flight. She never seems to go anywhere without that thing!
We took off on January 14th headed for Royal Oak, Michigan.
After takeoff, I was hungry! I requested out of the incubator so my mommy could feed me with my special angry cry that tells everyone around that I need to eat. Here I am in my pretty travel outfit, enjoying my first in-flight meal at 39,000 feet above sea level, somewhere over Nevada, first with Mommy, then with Daddy.
Here is our first airborne family picture. I don't know, but my mommy's milk tastes just as good in a Learjet seven miles up as is does on the ground, maybe even better!
After finishing my lunch, I took a siesta in Daddy's arm's, then again with Mommy.
We arrived at the Pontiac, Michigan airport and I was loaded up for the seventh ambulance ride in my life. Again, my mommy went with me. I was really hungry by the time we landed so my nurse took me out of the isolette and fed me a bottle in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I didn't even care that the road was bumpy; I just drank and drank until I was full. I even burped too. I don't care where I eat, as long as I eat!
On the 16th of January, I had a surgery on my left eye called a lensectomy and also a procedure called a vitrectomy. That's why I'm wearing this silly eye patch. If everything goes well, I'll be wearing baby glasses soon and will be able to see okay enough out of this eye. The surgeons here are experts in saving baby's eyes from this bad disease called Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP). There is great hope that this will work and the surgeon told my parents that he was "guardedly optimistic".
Please join my mommy and daddy in praying that all goes well for my left eye. I'm praying, won't you?
I recovered well again from my fourth surgery and was again breast feeding and bottle feeding within 24 hours of the operation.
The doctors felt that I needed to have another surgery on my right eye since it wasn't looking as well as they hoped after the first eye surgery in California. My parents began to wonder how long we would all be in Michigan in the middle of the winter.
